{"id":1335,"date":"2017-04-12T21:31:19","date_gmt":"2017-04-13T00:31:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vos.homolog.arsnova.work\/?p=1335"},"modified":"2017-09-29T14:33:59","modified_gmt":"2017-09-29T17:33:59","slug":"3-things-united-teaches-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vos.homolog.arsnova.work\/?p=1335","title":{"rendered":"3 Things the United Scandal Teaches Us About Our Culture"},"content":{"rendered":"
(pode ler este artigo em portugu\u00eas aqui<\/a>)<\/h5>\n

It\u2019s inevitable that we talk about what happened to that passenger on that United flight if we\u2019re talking about the United States right now. The thing is, it shows us something about where we\u2019ve come as a culture that definitely won\u2019t sit easy.<\/p>\n

1. We can\u2019t control our outrage<\/h2>\n

We’re at a point where it\u2019s practically possible to track the sequence of events each time this kind of news emerges. The United case wasn\u2019t any different. Our world is one where video cameras are available on any portable device, with new rules allowing them to be used even in the air. Of course the images of the middle-aged man being dragged off the plane didn\u2019t take their time to appear. Nor did the collective outrage toward United over what happened.<\/p>\n

What happened was horrible and the company\u2019s reaction only made it worse, unquestionably. But the tragic sequence has already become predictable\u2014every attack on humanity, on our dignity, follows the same line. It\u2019s become a formula for sensationalism, without being\u00a0the Onion<\/i>. We get outraged over headlines and short videos and lose both context and a more complete understanding of what happens in these situations. It\u2019s not difficult to understand why this doesn\u2019t help solve the underlying problem.<\/p>\n

2. Companies have already learned to commercialize our outrage\u2014but aren\u2019t free from it, not even United<\/h2>\n

After what happened in Chicago, United lost around 900 million dollars. It\u2019s an impressive sum, but it\u2019s not a one-off. Just before them, Pepsi launched an ad campaign commercializing the images of popular struggle and was excoriated across social media for it. Companies already see our outrage as a source of profit and apply it in their campaigns to varying degrees of success. Except that, sometimes, the huge profits they hope for end up being just the opposite. The power of outrage isn\u2019t controlled by companies, much as they try to.<\/p>\n

3. We have a police brutality problem<\/h2>\n

At the root of it all, the real problem wasn\u2019t what United did so much as the police unit that handled the removal of the passenger who refused to leave the plane. Once United\u00a0was forced to call the police to handle the belligerent passenger, the responsibility for\u00a0what happened passed to the police. In the tradition of the Chicago police, it wasn\u2019t all calm and polite, as we saw from the many videos. That\u2019s the problem.<\/p>\n

Since the death in 2014 of the black teen Michael Brown at the hands of a cop who would be later exonerated, police brutality and injustice have surged in American politics. There are innumerable cases, and each week we have some other, yet another example of this disservice to our population. And in these three years since, little or nothing have been done to confront police aggression, police militarization, or clearly-documented injustices committed by the police. We have a police brutality problem that is aggravated by advances in technology and increases in police budgets. Without confronting this problem, there will be more United-style controversies.<\/p>\n

Image: Juha Martikainen<\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(pode ler este artigo em portugu\u00eas aqui) It\u2019s inevitable that we talk about what happened to that passenger on that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":1333,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[127,54,53,422,420,126],"class_list":["post-1335","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nos-us","tag-english","tag-nos-us","tag-sacha","tag-scandal","tag-united-airlines","tag-united-states-of-america"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vos.homolog.arsnova.work\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vos.homolog.arsnova.work\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vos.homolog.arsnova.work\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vos.homolog.arsnova.work\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vos.homolog.arsnova.work\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1335"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vos.homolog.arsnova.work\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1335\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vos.homolog.arsnova.work\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1333"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vos.homolog.arsnova.work\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vos.homolog.arsnova.work\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vos.homolog.arsnova.work\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}